Paleoconservative Observations

No Myth Left Behind

Charles Murray makes a number of useful points in a WSJ editorial on education. First, IQ is an important part of measuring educational outcomes. Without some knowledge of where kids are, what they’re capable of, and what historical results look like, any evaluation is likely to be hopelessly optimistic or critical.

Second, there is a kind of utopian hopefulness about education based on a myth about the schools of the past. While discipline and patriotism were certainly superior in the schools preceding the 1970s, we sometimes forget huge numbers of people dropped out of school in the past–even in the recent past–and this “left behind” much higher quality students for schools to work with. Even today, all the talk of “good schools” in the suburbs elides over the fact that high IQ, stable families tend to have higher IQ and more stable students ready and itnerested in learning.

Finally, our national myth of equality is now enshrined in the No Child Left Behind Act, and equality movement from aspirational goal to practical mandate is creating real, impossible problems in schools. By affecting all students, these problems are now metastasizing. Like affirmative action and its demands of lockstop equality, the inevitable outcome of No Child Left Behind will likely be the lowering of standards; this terrible choice, one that would dumb down gifted and high IQ kids, is the only way to prevent our society from facing up to the reality: one half will always be “below average” by definition.

Murray writes:

Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP’s “basic achievement” score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP’s basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP’s definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.
The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder–the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of “The Bell Curve.”
This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.

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9 Responses

Nationally, we spend 10x the amount of money on special education than we do on gifted education. Not that I’m saying we should be pouring money into gifted programs–there’s an argument that raising the average is more important to our national interest. That said, focussing resources on the least capable students hardly seems like the right prescription for a robust future tax base.

Neither, I would think, would be importing uneducated Third Worlders, but you seem to love that.

I always find the dysjunction of our talk of domestic education and foreign immigration pretty amusing. If low skill workers were such a good thing, we should be encouraging more drop outs and McJobs, no?

But that wouldn’t be very nice; family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande, as our Republican President told us.

If we could have that kind of national willpower to have a true-blue nationalist, guest worker program, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now with legal and illegal immigration.

Affirmative action and a polyglot society with a white minority is not a formula for harmony. Blacks used to be 12% of the population and everyone else was insignificant; now we’re looking at 50/50 set aside/real job ratios. These p.c. stupidities are expanding to every field, particularly low room for error fields like engineering, medicine, piloting, etc.

A guestworker program isn’t going to solve ANYTHING. 1) We have birthright citizenship. 2) They have guestworkers in Germany and guess what, they aren’t going anywhere.

WE MUST LEARN TO DO OUR OWN DIRTYWORK.

WE MUST LEARN TO DO OUR OWN BRAINWORK.

“Finally, our national myth of equality is now enshrined in the No Child Left Behind Act, and equality movement from aspirational goal to practical mandate is creating real, impossible problems in schools. By affecting all students,”

Is that ever the truth. A friend of mind has a Ph.D. in mathematics. She is teaching (essentially) remedial math (really, arithmetic) skills in a supposedly “good” school district in outer exurbia. Everyone nowadays is on the academic track. But not everyone has academic aptitude. So, instead of teaching these kids to be good carpenters or plumbers – which some of them are capable of being – they are forced into taking academic-track math. Which they cannot do, no matter how well they are taught. This is a national nightmare.

Most of this is about the commets, which hit on a numebr of my bete noirs.

A polyglot society would be better than the highly fractious and acrimonious alternative we’re building these days – duo-glot. Besides, if we stopped privileging isthmian Mexican peasants) often non-Spanish-spakers from Oaxaca) over professionals and entrepreneuers from Macau and Mongolia to Monaco and Montenegro, that’s what we would get. If we just imported less of them, a at least less lative to other immigrants who would generally ahve strong incentives to learn english innorder to compete with them, they wouldn’t be such a problem, and we’ve had worse immigration problems in the past … the violent, besotted, promiscuous, clannish and politically apt Irish of yesteryear leap to mind – but even they were assimilated reasonably well within three generations. Mexicans are assimilating a we bit faster from a worse base, but the in-flows are increasing beyond the increases in our country’s remarkable assimilative engines.

I do have something to say about the psot though, at least NCLB establishes SOME standards, and the lousiest schools are exhibiting some fairly remarkable improvement because of the threat of real punishments. Bureaucracies, even ones as dysfunctional as our public schools, can back-fill pretty darn well.
Now to have competent and advanced tracks … other than whatever has taken the place of SATs these days, that is. There will always be AP testing, thank God.

On a side note, the illustration atop your bog is of someone expiring from yersinia pestis, no? Either that or Cicero opening his veins. Either way, it seems a very crabbed-European conservatism. Those guys pretty much lost all the way around, did they not?

I don’t see set-asides expanding lately. if anything, they’re getting tossed ou of court with welcome alacrity, and I say that as someone who has a financial interest in litigating such jobbist nonsense.

There were many problems with Irish immigration, but everything I’ve read has indicated they were very willing to adopt an American identity. The Catholic Church at that time also highly encouraged integration and loyalty to the country (it was part of a wider effort by Catholics to convince Protestants that they were loyal Americans too).

Many Mexicans today, on the other hand, seem far less intent on adapting an American identity. We’ve also lost the cultural confidence that helped make integration possible. Now the only American identity we’re willing to push is a hollow multi-culturalism.

Also, don’t forget, that there were significant pauses in immigration in our history. These were very important in integrating immigrants.